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In 1797, work was completed on a road through Saluda gap between Greenville and North Carolina (I believe this is the present Rt. 276) . According to Greenville, A History by A.V. Huff, Jr.:

An annual event was the passage of thousands of turkeys, driven in flocks of four hundred to six hundred. The birds were kept together by drovers carrying long whips with pieces of red flannel attached. By night the turkeys roosted in nearby trees, and by day they could travel about 8 miles. Both flocks and herds required large amounts of feed on the journey. The drives occurred every fall and continued until about 1885 when the railroads made them obsolete.

The goal of the drive was Travelers’ Rest, so named because it was a day’s journey from Greenville. ” Horses, mules, cattle, sheep and hogs from Kentucky and Tennessee came over the same road in large herds.” So there must have been quite a market going on in TR.

The Republican attack on birth control, as well as on abortion, is going strong here in the South. This recent article in the New Yorker is invaluable for you guys who don’t know the difficult history of the birth control movment, and its evolution into Planned Parenthood. this is a large pdf file, and well worth the read.

Something goes wrong, and I search the forums, and get hints like: “look at the sticky in this forum”. Big help. Or else, “What’s your configuration? Are you running linux?”. Always good to answer a question with another question.

Usuallly the problems are pretty arcane. I had an issue with vsftpd, and the only help I could find on that issue was, “Be sure your’re running version 2007, not 2.06.” I’m running version 2.02, which is the latest version available for my operating system (CentOS 6).

We attended a funeral today. I swear, I will never attend another funeral in South Carolina–unless it’s an RC mass (which might last for 20 minutes–and has nice-smelling incense). For over an hour we were harangued and preached at by two, count’em two, baptist preachers. “I’m sure everyone here is a Christian,” said one of the other speakers; I resisted jumping up and contradicting her. I attended the funeral out of respect for the deceased; I was afforded no respect. I’m not going to participate in these shams anymore.

Tags on pillows, on mattresses, on anything withf a fabric or stuffing that needs to be identified. You need to know what’s in the thing you bought, because there may be llergies involved. Okay, I get that. But that tag, that’s so ugly–why is it sewn into the seam? Sure, you don’t want it easily removed–but sewn into the seam?

I suggest all pillows, etc, be made with a matching-fabric appedndage, onto which the contents-tag can be sewn. Then you could remove the ugly white tag by snipping off the little appendage, and the remaining bit of fabric, which is sewn into the seam, is invisible.

To give ourselves a few moments of rest. To retreat from the hurley-burly of the day. To go to sleep. To meditate. To drown the roar of an airplane’s engines. To escape that most annoying noise from the TV down the hall. In short, for what we think of a privacy–to be alone with our own thoughts.

What kind of ear plugs?

The soft foam-rubber kind. E.A.R. is a favorite brand. Flents now makes an equivalant type. They must be a cylindrical. You roll them between your thumb and forefinger, then insert them into your ear beyond the outer lobe so that when they expand, the completely fill that passageway leading to the eardrum.

What’s a bad ear plug?

Any that is made of a solid material, such as wax, or rubber; the idea is to block the sound waves–a solid will conduct the sound waves.

Bad Idea: a cone-shaped foam plug. You might look at these and say, Yes, my ear passage narrows as it goes inside, so I should get an earplug to fit. But you don’t want an exact fit: you want to fill up the passageway. The foam is foam so that it can expand to fill up that space.

Doesn’t this get rather expensive?

Not at all, as the foam rubber cylinder can be laundered and re-used. Save the pairs of earplugs after you use them; when you have collected enough, put them into a bag made for delicate fabrics, and run them through the washing machine and drier. They’ll come out fresh and ready to be re-used.

My used earplugs get rather un-soft.

Soften the earplugs by hydrateing them. You can hold them in your hand for a while; you can breath on them, for a quick hydration; put them in a shirt pocket, near your skin–you are perspiring and exhaling all the time through your skin, which will soften up the foam shortly. Probably not something you want to share.

Avis and I went to see the HD showing of the Met’s production of Sigfried yesterday at a movie theater here in South Carolina. It was a small theater, with a posted capacity of 159. We arrived 10 minutes early, and were alone in the room, so we got to choose good seats, row high enough and in the center. A total of 9 people, including us, eventually attended. But what gets me is that four of those other seven decided to sit directly in front of us! Choosing from 157 other seats, they needed to clump up right by us.

This was not the first time–at the previous showing of Don Giovanni, we were also alone until five people arrived, who decided to sit right next to us, and then decided they didn’t like those seats, so they got up and moved–directly behind us! All this in an otherwise empty theater.